Realism and Idealism - The post–cold war era

Photo by: James Steidl

With the termination of the Cold War and collapse of the USSR in
1990–1991, the United States quickly emerged as the world's
lone superpower. Under the leadership of President Bill Clinton, the
realization of the country's superpower status inaugurated another
massive disagreement over the country's proper role in world
affairs. Not since classic Rome had a single state towered so completely
over its potential rivals. Behind the debate over American global
responsibility was President George H. W. Bush's refusal, in 1992,
to confront the well-publicized genocide in Bosnia and his tardy,
reluctant involvement in feeding the starving people of Somalia. For his
critics, the end of the Cold War presented the United States, with all its
power, an unprecedented opportunity to embrace the country's
historic mission to humanity. The risk-avoiding approaches of the Bush
years seemed to assure only the loss of national self-respect and the
denial of America's proper role in world affairs. The country, some
argued, had the obligation to exercise its exceptional power aggressively
in its own and the world's deepest interests.

Undaunted by the doubtful relevance of America's self-assigned
obligations to humanity, President Clinton promised that, after January
1993, U.S. foreign policy would focus on the goal of expanding democracy
and humane values. In his inaugural address, he pledged U.S. action
whenever "the will and conscience of the international community is
defied." There would be interventions, he promised, not only to
defend national interests, but also to satisfy the national conscience. On
becoming U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in February 1993, Madeleine
Albright acknowledged: "If there is one overriding principle that
will guide me in this job, it will be the inescapable
responsibility…to build a peaceful world and to terminate the
abominable injustices and conditions that still plague
civilization." Clinton elucidated his agenda before the UN General
Assembly on 27 September 1993. "During the Cold War," he
said, "we sought to contain a threat to [the] survival of free
institutions. Now we seek to enlarge the circle of nations that live under
those free institutions." For the first time in history, he added,
"we have the chance to expand the reach of democracy and economic
progress across the whole of Europe and to the far reaches of the
world." From the outset, Clinton faced a powerful realist critique
of the necessity and feasibility of his burgeoning campaign, much of it
based on the admonitions of Hamilton, Washington, and John Quincy Adams
against foreign crusading.

For the Clinton administration, three countries seemed to require
immediate attention—Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia. It launched
immediate interventions in all three, with doubtful results. In none of
the three did Washington achieve its stated objectives. Haiti remained a
basket case, economically and politically; the death of American soldiers
in Somalia late in 1993 prompted Clinton to withdrew those that remained.
In Bosnia, the three goals of U.S. involvement—the return of the
refugees, the creation of a multiethnic state, and the arrest and trial of
Serb war criminals—remained unfulfilled. In 1999, Kosovo emerged as
the defining issue in Clinton's crusade for human rights by
scolding and chastising foreign transgressors. On 24 March he unleashed a
NATO-backed air war against Serbia, both to protect the Kosovars and to
bring Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, to justice.
Clinton's Kosovo intervention was the first resort to force for
purely humanitarian objectives in the nation's history. The
seventy-eight days of bombing brought a Serb capitulation without creating
the desired peaceful, multi-ethnic regime in Kosovo. NATO leaders, meeting
in Washington during April 1999, accepted membership in Clinton's
global crusade for human rights. They proclaimed human rights, not
national sovereignty, as the guiding principle in international affairs.
It mattered little. U.S. critics of both the ends and the means of the
Kosovo war predicted that the experiment would not be repeated.

Clinton's idealist crusade to improve the human condition turned
out to be Euro centric; in the Atlantic world, at least, massive
repression had become unacceptable, especially if it occurred in a small,
defenseless region. The Serbian experience was no measure of the
West's response to ubiquitous challenges to Western values
elsewhere. Neither Washington nor the European capitals responded to the
pervading horrors of Africa and Asia, beginning in Rwanda in 1994 and
continuing through central Africa to Sierra Leone and elsewhere. Continued
global suffering illustrated the magnitude and tenacity of the
world's political and societal disabilities, as well as the absence
of external power and will to confront them.

Through two centuries of its history, the United States experienced a
persistent debate over approaches to foreign policy. It was a controversy
absent in nations whose political philosophy derived from different
assumptions about humanity and the state. In general, the American debate
embraced a realist-idealist contest, although at times the issues produced
shifting positions and clouded the fundamental clash between realist and
idealist goals and assumptions. But the continued debate, with neither
side acknowledging defeat, attested to the abiding fundamentals of both
positions. Realists argued that the country's external policies be
guided by national interests and the simple desire to maximize stability
and minimize harm. They asked that the United States exert its leverage in
pursuit of humane objectives only where assured successes were
commensurate with costs and effort. For them, no policy choice would
achieve utopia. Idealist proposals comprised largely sentimental and
rhetorical responses to meliorist visions of a malleable world, supposedly
subject to the reforming influences of American political and economic
institutions. It was an approach dominated by seductive ends, with little
concern for means.

America's vibrant civilization enhanced the attractiveness of the
American model, while the uniqueness of the country's traditions
and environment limited the expansive power of its example. The
country's long pursuit of meliorist dreams demonstrated its limited
knowledge and authority to institute democracy and a humane order in other
lands. Still, the meliorist vision never faltered and always remained
subject to arousal by the trials of other lands. In practice, however,
realism defined the fundamental formulations of all U.S. foreign policy,
except the moral crusading in Cuba and East Asia at the turn of the
nineteenth century, as well as the Wilson-dominated responses to the
challenges of the interwar decades. The country's long experience
in foreign affairs demonstrated that objectives that ignored or
transcended the nation's interests could not long endure.